The Mason's Unfinished Wall

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Illustration: Room 62 — The Mason's Unfinished Wall

Somebody was bricking up a doorway and stopped. The wall stands eleven courses high in a fourteen-course opening, dead plumb, beautifully laid, and then nothing — a trowel still bedded in a mortarboard gone hard as the floor, a plumb-bob hanging dead still on its line.

He wrote on the bricks as he laid them. Not a mason's tally: sentences, one to a course, small and level and getting less level as they go down. The top course is legible from where you stand. It says: I am not sure the King knows what he asked for.

DM summary. The single most useful room in the deck for a party that reads. A dead mason's confession, laid course by course, that names the pier holding this quarter of the maze up, records that some rooms turn, and says where the gatehouse is. No threat, no check to enter, and a bricked doorway the party may open if they want to spend twenty minutes and make a great deal of noise.

Terrain & Features

Battle map: custom map. A 30 × 25 ft corridor stub ending in a part-bricked doorway — two lines and a wall; sketch it. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.

Dimensions. 30 ft × 25 ft, ceiling 12 ft. A stub of corridor with a fourteen-course doorway in the east wall, part-bricked.
Light. None. This is a working space with no lamp left in it; the party brings the light and the DM should say how much of the wall it reaches at once. Reading all eleven courses by a single torch takes twice as long.
The wall. Eleven courses of dressed limestone block, laid dry-jointed at the bottom and mortared badly at the top, as though he was hurrying. Three courses above the eleventh are stacked ready on the floor. He was bricking the doorway from this side, which means he was shutting something out, or in, and the confession says which.
The mortarboard and tools. Trowel, line, plumb-bob, two chisels, a water-jar with nothing in it. Two hundred years of dry air have left the steel as brittle as biscuit. The chalk is still chalk.
The chalk cross. On the south wall, four feet up, a cross a yard across with a number beside it in Knossian numerals. It is not decoration. It is a structural mark and it is the reason this room matters.
Older masonry underneath. The corridor's lower three feet are a different stone, a different century, and a different building — this stub was a temple precinct before it was a maze corridor, and the join is visible at ankle height all the way round.

Traps / Puzzles / Checks

Reading the confession. Eleven courses, from the top down. Each course is a separate piece of information and the party can stop at any point. There is no save, no trap, and nothing punishes a slow reader.

Element	Value
Reading courses 11–8 (the top four)	No check. Anyone literate, two minutes
Reading courses 7–4	Investigation DC 13 — the hand deteriorates and the mortar has smeared it
Reading courses 3–1	Investigation DC 16, or DC 13 with more light than one torch, or automatic with twenty minutes and a rubbing (chalk and cloth)
Understanding the chalk cross	History DC 14 or any character with stonemasonry, engineering, or dwarven training — no check with a plumb-bob and ten minutes
Total time to strip the room	Fifteen minutes at a walk, five if the party splits the courses between readers
Solved state	The party knows: which pier holds this quarter up, that some rooms rotate, and roughly where the great gate is. Write all three on a note and hand it over

What the courses actually say. Paraphrase freely; these are the facts, in the order the party gets them.

Course	What it says
11	I am not sure the King knows what he asked for.
10	He is a mason, third of his name, and he was contracted for walls, not for this.
9	The architect changes the plan weekly, and the changes are not written down anywhere except in the walls themselves.
8	Three of the rooms turn. He built two of them. They are set on a pintle and a bronze race and they are meant to make the count come out wrong, and they do.
7	The great gate is nine hundred paces up and west of here, and there is a gatehouse against the inside of it with a man in it who keeps a book.
6	The whole of this quarter stands on one pier, because the architect wanted the span clear. He marked it in chalk so that nobody would cut into it.
5	Two of his crew went in to shore the far side and did not come out, and he was told not to ask.
4	They have started bringing children in. He says this once, flatly, and does not say it again.
3	He is bricking this doorway on his own initiative and against instruction.
2	What is on the other side has learned the sound of a trowel.
1	Twelve courses would have done it. I laid eleven.

Exits

AObviousThe low door under the scaffold in the west wall, standing open, exactly as he came in. No check.

BConditionalThe bricked doorway. Opens by pulling courses — twenty minutes and Athletics DC 14 with any lever, or ten minutes with a crowbar and no check, or one round with anything that shapes stone.Rider: it is loud, and the noise goes both ways. The party arrives in the next room having announced themselves — if that room has an ambush, it gets its surprise round; if it has something asleep, it is awake.

CHiddenThe mason's own sally-hole behind the stacked blocks, a yard-square gap in the older temple masonry that he was using rather than walking round. Investigation DC 15, or automatic for anyone who moves the stack.Rider: you come out of a temple wall rather than a maze corridor, which anything religious in the next room will notice; take advantage on the first Religion or History check made there.

Loot

None. His tools are two centuries of rust in the shape of tools, his coin was paid to his family before he came down here, and the blocks weigh 90 lb apiece. The chalk works, if anybody wants chalk.

Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15

APL	Adjustment
6	All reading DCs −2, and course 6 (the pier) is legible without a check. A younger party needs the good information more, not less
9	As written
12	Reading DCs +1. Somebody has been here since — two courses have been chiselled out, and which two is the DM's choice from the table above
15	Reading DCs +3, four courses defaced, and the thing behind the bricked doorway is still there and has heard you. Do not stat it; make the wall bulge one inch while a character is reading course 2

DM Notes

Pacing. Eight to fifteen minutes, and it is entirely in the players' hands. Read the top course aloud, let them decide how deep to dig, and do not hurry them — this is the room where a table stops being lost.
If you are behind schedule, read courses 11, 8, 7, and 6 aloud with no checks at all and move on. Four minutes. The other seven courses are texture, and the three that matter are the ones that name a pier, a rotation, and a gate.
This room is load-bearing for three Resolutions and you should know which before you run it. Course 6 and the chalk cross are X12's source for which pillar holds the roof up. Course 8 is X14's correction — a party mapping the maze is wrong by exactly the amount the rotating rooms have turned, and this is where they find that out. Course 7 names the gatehouse for X08. Deliver the one that is live and let the others be background.
Clue drip. Two objects, if you want the clue on a thing rather than a line: the chalk cross itself (X12, Sign or Proof tier), and the plumb-bob still hanging dead plumb in a maze whose corridors are not (X14, Trace).
Table safety. Course 4 is a single flat sentence about children being brought into the maze, and it lands harder than anything else in the room because it is not dramatised. If the table has steered away from that theme, make course 4 about his crew instead and lose nothing.
Do not open the wall for them, and do not punish them for opening it. The bricked doorway is a genuine choice with a genuine cost, and course 2 is the warning. If they open it, the next room is whatever the d100 says it is — the maze does not owe them the thing he was shutting out. Let the dread be free.
The mason has no ghost. There is no shade here, no revenant, no voice. Every other room in this deck has something in it; this one has a man's handwriting and that is stronger. Resist the urge to add him.